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Lynne Kaufman on reincarnating Sylvia Plath at the Marsh

Lily JaniakMay 9, 2019Updated: May 14, 2019, 12:54 pm

Actress Lorri Holt plays the ghost of poet Sylvia Plath as she revisits her gravesite to examine her death and legacy during a rehearsal at the Marsh for “Who Killed Sylvia Plath.” Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

It should never be a surprise that a rehearsal featuring Lorri Holt tingles with life and sinks in to every chance for a laugh. Holt, who originated the role of Harper in workshop productions of “Angels in America,” radiates the warmth of a true stage pro — someone who makes every stage as intimate and convivial as a living room party.

But that’s perhaps not how most audiences think of Sylvia Plath, whose ghost Holt embodies in “Who Killed Sylvia Plath,” opening Saturday, May 11 at the Marsh in San Francisco.

While Lynne Kaufman’s world premiere one-woman play honors Plath’s darkness and wildness (“I eat men like air,” goes one line, borrowing from Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”), the show, in which Plath revisits her gravesite to examine her life choices, also paints the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet as plucky but put-upon, an artistic genius yet an everywoman — at least in the sexism she copes with, not least from her husband, Ted Hughes.

The Chronicle spoke with Kaufman about Plath’s tragic literary successors, what she’s meant to women writers and what it means to write about someone who never got to live her full life. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What draws you to Plath?

A: She was just one of the poster girls for being born at the wrong time, along with Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. She was kind of the last in the line of repression, of the patriarchy still being there, and the tragedy of somebody young and beautiful and their whole life before her, already highly accomplished and recognized as a poet, taking her own life, particularly leaving two babies.

It was a coming together of a thrilling, melodramatic, very distinctive biography, and then this wonderful work. Her life intermingled with her work, and she wrote about it.

Actress Lorri Holt as the ghost of Sylvia Plath in rehearsal for “Who Killed Sylvia Plath” at the Marsh. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Q: Is there a particular poem or writing that spoke to you most?

A: “The Bell Jar.” Must’ve read it in college. It felt very very liberating to me that somebody was putting forth the depression and the point of getting shock therapy for it.

The thing that attracted me, she’s sort of split. I remember feeling a kind of ’50s, Donna Reed, doing everything right, reading “The Joy of Cooking” and wearing skirts and getting her hair looking right and defining herself by a man — versus that other part that is really kind of wild. … She bleached her hair. … She said, “When I’m my natural brown, I’m one person, and then when I go blond, I’m another.” I think that some of the bad girl, the badass, is in that blonde.

Q: What motivates Plath to speak in your show? What is she trying to work out by telling her story?

A: If you ask most people who’ve even heard of (Plath), they’ll know two things: One, that she put her head in the oven, and if they remember from college, reading “The Bell Jar.” That’s all they have. …

(In the play), she’s coming back, and she asks three basic questions: … Why did I do it? Would I do it again? And then — this is her ironic, cynical voice — was it a good career move? And that’s the key that’s bugging her. Is that why she’s remembered? And partly the answer’s yes. …

I think every woman writer has somehow incubated the story of Sylvia Plath. … What I hope I’m showing with Sylvia is a woman who has learned, just as many of us do. I’m giving her a chance to grow up and to look at her life. …

She was an important ancestor figure. It was hard for me to figure out how I was going to be a mom and a playwright and live my own life and travel and deal with two kids and a husband.

Q: How’d you alight on the idea to set the show at her grave?

A: This book of letters came out of her correspondence — 1,200 pages. That was the second volume! … All this stuff was coming out, and in it, I saw that when they talked about her life, they talked about feminists going to the graveyard, to the cemetery, and chiseling out the “Hughes.” That was what brought me into the play, thinking, “OK, we’re always looking for why. Who can we blame for something?”